Learn WordPress and Dream Big: Academy Courses Now Available On-Demand

All courses in our online learning school, The Academy, are now available to enroll in and complete at any time!

Yes, we’ve scrapped start and end dates for courses and removed the week-by-week release of units. Now you can join a course at any time, work through the videos, tutorials and assessments at your own pace, and complete a course at a time that suits you.

We’ve had so many requests for our courses to be evergreen and we’re excited to finally make our courses available all year round.

There’s Just One Catch…

Got a business idea but need some guidance to help get it up and running? Enroll in Dream Small, Market Big & Don’t Do It This Way and get one-on-one feedback on your business plan.

So enroll now and join the 302 other people who have already enrolled and waiting for the course to start.

Hang on, April 11? Yes, this is the only course in The Academy that is not available on-demand and will continue to run twice a year.

Since this course is very hands on and James gets involved in the weekly discussions with students and personally grades each and every assignment, we’ve made the call to only run this course when he can commit the time – the course just isn’t the same without his one-on-one feedback, after all.

Introducing: Self-Assessed Challenges

When we launched The Academy around this time last year, our aim was to provide WordPress-specific courses that were different from those offered by more established sites like Treehouse and Lynda.

We wanted The Academy to be more personalized, and we wanted students to feel like they were learning one-on-one. So we added assignments to our courses, which our course instructors manually graded, complete with feedback.

This worked really well for a while, but as we introduced new courses and the grading began to stack up, and the buzz from members who wanted courses on-demand grew louder, we realized something had to give.

So in order to make courses evergreen and ease the workload on our course instructors, we’ve removed the required final assignments from all courses (except Dream Small). Students are now encouraged to complete a self-assessed challenge at the end of most courses. Quizzes still remain for all courses and we’ll continue to review and improve how we assess student learning.

Whether you want to learn how to development websites, brush up on your coding skills, or learn the ins and outs of running a business, there’s a course in The Academy for you.

Enroll in The Academy Today!

Whether you want to learn WordPress development or JavaScript, dig into the complexities of running a Multisite network, start your own business, or launch a new career, we’ve got a course for you.

James Farmer has 10 years’ experience as an online entrepreneur and is co-founder of WPMU DEV.

In this course, James will help you come up with and examine your business idea, discuss how to develop, manage and market it into a real company, and help you figure out the next steps forward.

You’ll get the opportunity to discuss your business ideas and direction with James, expert facilitators, and your peers and complete the course with a fully-formed plan ready to hit the ground running.

Becoming a WordPress developer involves so much more than just installing the CMS, customizing a few themes and setting up a bunch of plugins.

This seven-part course for beginners will teach you the fundamental concepts of WordPress development. Letting you make the leap from tinkerer to developer. By the end of the course, you will be able to create your own rudimentary themes and plugins, and flesh them out with your own features.

So you’ve learnt some PHP, created a basic theme and coded a couple of simple plugins. Now what?

In this eight-part course, instructor Rachel McCollin will teach you intermediate concepts of WordPress development, including testing and releasing themes and plugins, translating projects, queries and loops, and concepts such as metadata, taxonomies, and custom posts.

You’ll get the opportunity to run your code past Rachel, work on meaningful projects, and complete the course with a solid understanding of best practice WordPress development.

Are you ready to push your PHP skills and add even greater complexity and functionality to your WordPress plugins and themes?

In this six-part course, you’ll learn object-oriented programming techniques, how to write object-oriented plugins and work with transients, using the command line to improve your workflow, using Gulp to compile JavaScript and SASS, and automating WordPress with WP-CLI.

Run your code past course facilitators, work on meaningful projects, and complete the course with a solid understanding of best practice advanced development for WordPress.

In this six-part course, instructor Daniel Pataki will walk you through the basics of JavaScript, touching on jQuery and how to add interactions to WordPress. You’ll also learn about AJAX and then use what you’ve learned to create a custom plugin.

You’ll get the opportunity to run your code past course facilitators, work on a meaningful project, and complete the course with a solid understanding of how JavaScript and WordPress work together.

Multisite lets you create a network of websites, all running on a single WordPress installation. Setting it up is fairly simple, but the intricacies are in running a secure network with a community of users and sites.

In this seven-part course, let Multisite expert Rachel McCollin guide you through the basics, including how to install and configure Multisite and how to enable site and user creation, as well as advanced topics such as domain mapping and network management.

Starting out in WordPress and need some direction with your career? Using WordPress as a hobby and want to turn it into a full-time job? Or maybe you’re stuck in a career rut and need some help?

In this six-part course, you’ll learn about the wide range of WordPress career options available to you. Developer Rachel McCollin will help you identify your career goals and provide information, tips and advice to help you formulate your own career plan and follow it through. By the end of the course, you’ll have clear goals and know which path you need to take to forge a successful career with WordPress.

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20 Responses

I’ve been nagging and murmuring for this for so long… I feel so much better now :D Thanks guys, this is going to be helpful!
Now to the next point – a WooCommerce dedicated Upfront theme (don’t tell me it’s now compatible, I know it. We need a complete theme from you :P)

:-) Your persistence paid off. I think that this is a great move on our part. Having the leisure to do courses at your own page will hopefully help more students complete our courses. Looking forward to seeing you take one of our courses.

I understand that. The implementation just seems to have overlooked some very important things, that’s all.

For example: a certificate holds no weight when a test is self-graded. Indeed, attaching it to a resume would be akin to attaching a note from my Mom saying I’m a good boy. ;) A better solution would have been a badge system – a user completes the course, earns the badge, and it displays on a public profile here – with all badges being served from this site to prevent forgery. See this example – it’s beautifully executed.

As another example: the article indicates that the Academy’s goal was to offer a more personal experience (ie, the instructor interaction) than, say, Treehouse and others. Since that’s gone, the Academy offerings are pretty much the same as what you can get for free in Google or YouTube. The biggest thing that sets Academy apart now is the fact that it offers less than 10 tutorial series.

Bear in mind that I’m not complaining about these things; I’m just sharing a perception from a member standpoint. It seems that, in an effort to implement on-demand functionality, a sort of tunnel-vision approach was used and it let seemingly obvious things fall to the wayside.

I hear you. We still offer the personal touch, though. It might not be the instructor directly, but the facilitator. I am on duty ready to answer any questions. :-) Bear in mind I have to sleep too. The Academy have 8 facilitators that check the posts that come in.
On-demand functionality was requested many times and we like making our members happy, but it is not always in our power to make everyone happy.
About the badge system. It sounds like a great idea. You might request it in our section on feature request. https://premium.wpmudev.org/forums/forum/feature-suggestions

This is really great!
I missed so much of the courses provided due to many commitments and have accumulated quite a few incomplete courses.
Now that most of them are evergreen…
Can we get a feature to delete those past incomplete courses from our My Course page?

I think this was a very good choice. Evergreen courses offers so much more. Now you can focus on building your skills in your own time. Life can sometimes become very hectic and having the freedom to do a course in bit size chunks are wonderful.

Changing how the courses were run came about when students requested it. We know how busy lives can get. This way our students are not pressured into completing a course on a set date. If you guys are happy we are happy. It is very important to us that you guys succeed.

:-) We are all excited about our evergreen courses as we call it here at WPMU DEV. Well, now you can do them at your leisure. So I hope to see you hanging around The Academy very soon. We are all a little weird with crazy schedules not to mention living, learning and coding awesome features for our members.

So, is there some sort of WordPress certification that these courses prepare you for? Do you get some sort of certificate of completion, or digital badging, for these courses? Basically, I’m looking for some way to show proficiency that could be easily added to a resume.

Yes! You’ll get a certifcate of completion for every course you finish in The Academy. Our courses have been put together by WordPress experts in their fields and include challenging tutorials, videos that walk you through code as well as tough quizzes to really test what you’re learning. We also have courses in beginner, intermediate and advanced development to distinguish between varying levels of difficulty when working with WordPress. By the end of a course, you’ll have sound knowledge in what you’ve studied and a cool certificate that you can add to your resume and display on your portfolio if you choose.